So we’re really trying to grow home health. And we’re really also continuing to look for those strategic opportunities to grow personal care, either strengthening the states in which we currently operate are potentially entering into new states where we would like to go. So that will be our focus that you’ll see over the next few quarters in 2023.
Operator: The next question comes from Tao Qiu with Stifel.
Tao Qiu: Could you talk about any shift in discharge rate or referral sources that may have impacted this quarter on the hospice side? And since you mentioned the positive hiring trend, which contributed to the 6.6% quarter-on-quarter growth in the admissions there. Should we expect a relatively strong sequential gain in ADC in the first quarter this year? And additionally, JourneyCare, I know it has played a major part last year. And when compared to your $50 million annual revenue expectation, should we expect any upside in terms of the continued ramping up of performance there?
Dirk Allison: Yes, happy to take those questions. First, when you look at the just kind of mix from an admission and discharge rates, we haven’t — what we have seen is certainly some improvement in our median length of stay year-over-year. We’re kind of back to that upper 20s where we were pre-pandemic. We did see a 1-day slide sequentially. I think the one area where we’re still seeing an opportunity for improvement is when you look at nursing home, discharge length of stay and median length of stay, those still haven’t recovered. So we’re tending to get those patients later in the cycle. And I think some of that may resolve itself with the ending of the public health emergency and some of the special rules around SNFs and related to skilling patients that you did not have to have the prior 3-day hospitalization that was previous pre-pandemic.
So I think there’s certainly some opportunities there. When you look at from the standpoint of what does Q1 look like. We certainly have added a lot of staff. So that’s very helpful to help with the growth aspects. But I still think you’re going to see a little bit of a bumpiness in hospice in probably the first half of the year and more of the growth is going to come through in the second half of the year. And part of it is related to what I just said, related to expiration of the — some of the allowances under the PHE. With respect to JourneyCare, we’ve fully integrated JourneyCare into our processes, our systems, I think it’s just poised for some growth. But again, they still have some of the same issues that you see for I think they’re going to be kind of challenging in the first couple of quarters related to some of the — can we get more nursing home business.
And particularly, can we get patients that come on service a little earlier out of those facilities.
Tao Qiu: Got you. And also, it sounds like you’re going to get pretty strong rate growth in personal care services this year, and with the improved hiring trend when you return to a more normalized volume growth as well. So should we — when we look at the organic growth profile, should we expect that you can sustain kind of the top end of that 3% to 5% growth? Or do you foresee yourself doing even higher than that?
Dirk Allison: Well, I think you could certainly say that we are we’re excited about the potential for growth this year in personal care, we would tend to believe that it could be to the upper end of that 3% to 5%. We’re not ready to adjust that level. At this point in time, we want to see what continues to happen over this next year. I think the exciting part for us, as I mentioned in our comments was the fact that for the first time since the pandemic has occurred, we are starting to see over the last couple of quarters growth in personal care volume in the hours provided. And I think that’s very exciting because that was a struggle that all the industry had for the last 2, 2.5 years. And now that we’re able to hire more individuals are coming back on service, we’re able to then put them to work, seeing this hourly growth and then put on top of that, just normalized rate impact, we believe that 2023 will be a nice year for us.
